It’s an exciting time for all involved, and is the result of a culmination of many like-minded individuals. Everyone’s worked hard and as the initial test community seem to have responded positively and in such detail they could test anything from Word to Think Bingo (http://www.thinkbingo.com/) with their eyes closed. The people behind the development had a few words on the announcement of the first Log4PHP.

Here is the original statement:

The Log4PHP community is pleased to introduce the Apache Log4PHP 2.0.0 (Incubating) release [1]. It’s the first Log4PHP release since 2004 and tons of changes have been done. Finally Log4PHP has become a well tested framework made for PHP 5. Many thanks to all the contributors who made this release possible. Please download [2] Log4PHP and enjoy

The Log4PHP team

[1] http://incubator.apache.org/log4php/changes-report.html
[2] http://incubator.apache.org/log4php/download.html

I think I will use a similar script for pushing stuff with Log4PHP. I will propose that today on the mailinglist. Additionally I think about making a WordPress plugin for my own blog. We’ll see how fast I am

Your comments are appreciated!

Here is the wave script. Its released under Apache SL 2.0. Credits to the Wave team, I based everything on their examples.

More TIKA changes: http://www.apache.org/dist/lucene/tika/CHANGES-0.4.txt

After some small googling, I figured out that the most cool feature of the SVN properties is to ensure that if you check out something from repository, you’ll get the line endings you need.

“In other words, if a user on a Windows machine checks out a working copy that contains a file with an svn:eol-style property set to native, that file will contain CRLF EOL markers. A Unix user checking out a working copy which contains the same file will see LF EOL markers in his copy of the file.”

Quote from: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s02.html#svn-ch-7-sect-2.3.5

So, this is client config. That means YOU have to make sure that you add your files with the correct properties. Let’s assume you want to add a file named test.txt. You would do:

svn add test.txt

After adding you need to perform:

svn propset -R svn:eol-style native test.txt

to set the properties correctly.

Having that beeing said. most people will complain now that this is a difficult task and very error proven. Well it is. But you don’t have to take care if you are sure that only one operating systems (means: one development enviroment)  is set up. This is true for most projects I guess.

If it is NOT the case, you can force your developers to create a default config setup. On windows it just some entries in the registry (please try this, I am not using windows for open source stuff anymore), on Mac OS X and Linux the file ~/.subversion/config must be edited.

In my case, this did do the trick:

[miscellany]
enable-auto-props = yes

[auto-props]
*.java = svn:mime-type=text/plain;svn:eol-style=native
*.css = svn:mime-type=text/plain;svn:eol-style=native

or at least mostly.  SVN told me, after I wanted to change properties to native, that my css files were binary, which this wasn’t the case, of course! I couldn’t change it, until Sebastian Bazley came up with the following:

svn pl -v

showed:

Properties on 'maven.css':

  svn:mime-type

    application/octet-stream

He further told me to do:

svn pd svn:mime-type maven.css

And that was it – SVN is forced to use mime type I want.

Last but not least, here is the link to the apache recommendation or SVN config.

However, if you read the article: please enjoy. If there are any further questions about the usage of Commons Compress, consider to add yourself to the mailinglists.

All the worlds speaks about testdriven development and unit testing. But most people finishing there exams don’t have a clue about what this means. To be honest, I was surprised that people could get out of a university just with one or two Junit tests implemented. Well, here are some words about testing.

What is a unit test?

A unit test is nothing else than some lines of test code which tries to check out if the lines of business logic you wrote actually works. To help you with this, tools like JUnit and PHPUnit (or SimpleTest in PHP enviroment) have been written. They are frameworks which give you some methods to work with. To be clear: a unit test is some kind of class which instantiates another class and checks if the parameters you put in bring the correct results.

What does testdriven development mean?

Hardcore people say, before you write the business logic, you’ll have to write a test case. This is test driven development: write your test, then write the actual business logic. For me it works usually like this: I write my business logic and as soon as I have something cool working, I write a testcase. Sometimes it behaves a bit different. Depends on. But thats a matter of taste. As usual I recommend not to be to extreme about everything and just try out what is best for you.

What and how much to test?

Everything. Well, not really. A good testing ratio is at 70%. More does mean that you even test your exceptions, less means you have forgotten some classes. There are tools available which help you with checking out how much you have tested. In Javaworld its Cobertura, in PHP its Spike PHP Testcoverage, for example.

How does a testcase look like?

Usually you have to extend your tester class from a class called TestCase or similar. In PHPUnit its PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase. They make your classes executable in the testing enviroment. Then implement methods – all methods which implement an actual test is prefixed with test.

An example from Log4PHP:

class LoggerLayoutHtmlTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {
    public function testErrorLayout() {

The testing frameworks usually look for methods like this and execute them one by one. In newer JUnit Versions you have to annotate testing methods. OK, and this is a valid PHP testcase:

public function testErrorLayout() {
        $event = new LoggerLoggingEvent("LoggerLayoutHtmlTest", new Logger("TEST"), LoggerLevel::getLevelError(), "testmessage");
        $layout = new LoggerLayoutHtml();
        $v = $layout->format($event);
        $e = "blub";
        self::assertEquals($v, $e);
    }

Again, its Log4PHP. I instantiate a class which I am intending to test and call a method on it. The result is stored in $v. What I expect is stored in $e. All testing frameworks provide you so called assert methods, which enable you to compare or check otherwise if the expectation meets the actual result. In my case, “blub” is expected. If this assertion fails, my tool shows me that error.

Why is it necessary to keep old tests?

If you change business logic or refactor something you can simply execute old tests and recognize if something goes wrong. People say, before putting an echo or System.out.prinln somewhere, write an test. I agree here. A good testing ratio makes your software stable and you take care of side effects, even when software grows. And before you deliver you run all your tests. This way you make sure that everything is fine.

Test Data and dependend Tests

To make it short, test methods should never depend on the success of  test methods. Each test method can be executed stand alone. Otherwise your life will be hell – think on thousand methods depending on each other. Same goes to test data. A testcase must not depend on data another test method created. This will cause you hell.

I know that this is very difficult  with databases. Testframeworks usually give you “tearUp” or “tearDown” methods which are called before a test method starts. You can create your testdata in the databases in these methods. But this is very time consuming. Test executions of this kind can easily take hours. Best is, keep your tables short, make a SQL file for each package or even each test case. There are no best practices which fits on each project.

In my last project we have used Excel (=Manager aware) to take care of the data and then generated SQL files out of it. Time consuming, complex, but it worked. The relations in this tables where to strong, we couldn’t keep the data care up otherwise.

Testing helps coding

Having said the above, you can imagine that you should think about testability BEFORE you code. Spaghetthi code isn’t testable. Make short methods. Keep in mind what “Separation of Concerns” means. Same goes to databases. Make them plugable. Not at all time foreign keys are good. Think about it twice – they are mighty but can be evil too. I have worked in projects where it was very heavy duty or even impossible to delete any data. If you write your application testable, its going to be good designed in much cases.

This doesn’t mean you should put all methods to public scope! Test cases should be in the same package as their Test classes are, so you can try to work with package scoped methods aswell. However, whatever you do, testable code is good, but it never should break encapsulation just for beeing testable.

In most cases private methods can be tested with the test of public methods. Test coverage tools help to identify test lacks.

What to test? Again!

Try to test all public methods! If you need to create files, use the tempfolder. Set up databases for the test. Use Jetty and HSQL if need it embedded – in PHP its PDO and SQLite. Don’t waste your time with testing exceptions which usually never happen. Just use 20% of your time to make 80% of tests! Try to test business logic – if that means the creation of complex objects, so be it. Maybe you can share the logic. But don’t get bored with testing getter and setters. Those are called thousand of times within normal tests or procedures, no need to do that.

How much time can test development need??

Calculate the same time as implemeting the testcase. Too much? Not really! Imagine you are writing business code for 5 hours. Thousands of outputs on the console you read manually. You delete it, check it in and later want to fix again. Put those outputs in again? Have commented it out? Code is ugly? Put all your stuff in a testcase. Nobody claims if you need 5 hours for it, if its done properly. Sometimes testcases need 3 days but the fix just 1 hour. This can happen in EAI enviroments, where multiple systems communicate. No problem here – these is business critical, automatic tests are the best you can do.

Commons Compress is a component that contains Ar, Cpio, Jar, Tar, Zip and BZip2 packages

Source and binary distributions are available for download from the Apache Commons download site:

http://commons.apache.org/compress/download_compress.cgi

When downloading, please verify signatures using the KEYS file available at the above location when downloading the release.

For more information on Apache Commons Compress, visit the Commons Compress home page:

http://commons.apache.org/compress/

Changes in this version include:

New features:
o Initial release

Have fun!
-Commons Compress team

Solution is to edit the following file:

$ vi configuration/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs

Just switch:

SHOW_WORKSPACE_SELECTION_DIALOG=false

to:

SHOW_WORKSPACE_SELECTION_DIALOG=true

and the workspace selection dialog should appear again. This gives you the option to choose another workspace.

For several reasons I had to format this one in NTFS and most of you know that this is a total game over for my Mac. Mac cannot access this format safely. There are other options to access NTFS from a Mac, for example Paragons software, but really, I don’t trust those geek software in that case too much. Hej, this is my data! My music! My life!

Then I came to Parallels Desktop, a Virtual Machine Player (and Creator) which is known as well integrated into the mac enviroment. And yes, it really is! I was never so surprised by any kind of software like I was here. Parallels makes you feel 100% integrated on both sides! With Tiger I cannot use all features, for example this Bootcamp stuff, which allows to play with your VM on a native speed level. However, for me it’s enough to see my windows apps looking like mac apps and that I can drag and drop between Finder and Win Explorer as I want.

Back to NTFS. I plugged in my NTFS drive but couldn’t create any folder on it nor could I copy a file. After some curses I figured out that I have mounted my 2Big Triple as a Network Storage, not as a local harddisk. Of course as a network harddisk I would need write access within mac, so I had to mount this drive directly to Parallels. This is easy under normal cirstumances. You can do this on the right bottom of the Parallels window, or, if running in coherance mode, from the menu bar “devices”. Simply choose one of the devices which you want to plug directly to your Windows.

I did so, but failed. The reason is beeing shown in the Device Manager of Windows. My USB Hub didn’t get any driver. I double clicked that b**** and told it to update the drive. No problem for windows since everything was prepared on the update site. After the install I had a locally plugged Harddisk – and know I can access to my NTFS harddisk from my Mac, ah, Windows, damn Macdows without any problems.

Great stuff, that Parallels. I will track this software for sure.

Normally I am working with OSX 10.4 means Tiger. I am composing ideas usually with GarageBand 3 and then, when the idea envolves, switch over to Logic Express 7.3 where I work out everything. GarageBand is a very useful tool to quickly record ideas when they come up and I cannot live without this. Well, actually I could, but my life is easier with GarageBand.

When I fired up the iLife08 Version of GarageBand 4.1.2 everything looks familiar. There were no surprises, never. At the start screen is a new button which invites you to create a “Magic Band” song or something like that. I really didn’t understand what this crap is. It’s a bit like a computer game without sense. Choose your style and you see a stage with several instruments on it. Click again and you have some fitting loops in your player. Well, don’t know why one should consider this useful. So, my choice is to ignore that “new feature”.

The first new feature I saw was that “arrangement” bar on top of my tracks. It makes it possible for me now to arrange several parts of my song and give it a name. Means: I mark a part of my song and name it “chorus” or “middle part” or whatever. Later I thought I can easily copy the whole part and drop it whereever I want. Well, not true. I just can move the whole collection around, but copy and paste is not possible. This makes the feature nice but doesn’t help in praxis. I really would like to copy past and then modify some parts. I hope that one improves. I read later that apple states that this feature works with copy and paste, but at least I couldn’t figure out how. That’s not what I expect from my Mac!

One cool new stuff is the extension of the automation features. Similar to old garageband where you could draw your panning and your volume for each track, you are now able to draw EQ and echoes too. Thats a very nice one, I like it! I really could use a feature where I can connect my own automation tools, but I guess this will stay future.

Multi-Take recording. Well THIS one is really great and is a feature I really have missed in Logic Express. But since I record all my instruments in Logic Express and just do some demo voices in GarageBand I will not buy Garageband 4.1.2 only cause of that.

Visual EQ. OK, nice to have. But again, I didn’t miss that since I have own plugins for the job or use Logic Express. However, it’s comfortable and useful. But not the feature that gives you the urgent need to upgrade.

Sooooo… OK. What’s new also?
You have the chance to burn a CD directly out of GarageBand. Well, I couldn’t do this since MacBook Air doesn’t have any CD-R drives or burning utilities. I guess It will work.

The LCD is a bit more comfortable. But nothing new here.

Instruments are strange. The laptop was preinstalled, but some of the instruments where missing. When clicking on the light grey instruments, GarageBand is telling me that it searches the instruments in the net and that I need 1,2 GB on space. What the heck? I didn’t try that out any further. If Apple really thinks I want to download 1.2 gig – no guys, are you kidding me? As I allready told you, I have no CD-Rom so a download is the only chance I have. Bah!

At least, I tried out if I can open a GarageBand 4 song with GarageBand 3 – it failed, of course. The import of a GarageBand 4 song into Logic Express 7.x fails too, of course.

Finally I am not very impressed by the new GarageBand version. If I would upgrade I get a multi-take feature and a nice arrangement tool, which doesn’t work at first glance. Automation is a bit cooler, yes. On the other hand my new GarageBand songs are not compatible with the products Logic Express 7 and not with older GarageBand versions. Means I would have to upgrade to Logic Express 8. And, hell, my Mac Mini which I use at the moment has not enough RAM memory for that version, so I would have to buy new Garageband, new Logic Express and a new Mac.

Really… not worth for me. I stay at Tiger with GarageBand 3 and Logic 7. These features are not enough. And if I would upgrade – I surely would leave GarageBand completly and use Logic 8 instead, since this has been enhanced visually a lot. So…. no go for GarageBand 4.